Duck and Cover -- Deja Vu All Over Again

by David Greenberg

Mr. Greenberg is a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and writes Slate's History Lesson column.

Within days, if not moments, the Homeland Security Department's
duct-tape-and-sheeting advisory went from frightening to farcical.
The government summons was met almost instantly with comparisons to
those Cold War civil-defense programs that now strike us as relics
of an hysterical age. "Duct and Cover," the headlines gibed.

It takes a leap of historical imagination to conceive how the Cold
War's nuclear attack drills, dog tags for school kids, and backyard
bomb shelters could ever have been taken seriously. But the story of
their transformation from grave national concern to joke helps
explain why the Bushies face an uphill battle in getting us to heed
their orange terror alerts today.

The dropping of the atom bomb in 1945--and the Soviet Union's
attainment of nuclear capability in 1949--transformed the meaning of
civil defense. During World War II, the government drafted citizens
to make tangible contributions to the war effort: scrimping on
scarce supplies such as meat and nylons; growing Victory Gardens;
joining scrap metal drives. Although officials urged these gestures
mainly to foster a feeling of patriotic engagement, their secondary
purpose--materially aiding America's military goals--was also
legitimate.

During the Cold War, however, there was little for citizens to do.
Preparedness became the watchword. (The forging of national spirit
was again an unstated but undeniable aim.) In January 1951 President
Truman created the Federal Civil Defense Administration, the
Homeland Security Department of its day. A pedagogical propaganda
agency, FCDA developed curricula for public schools and distributed
brochures, films, and radio segments. Home-economics classes taught
girls how to furnish bomb shelters. Advertising firms lent their
experts to the mission, newspapers offered free placement of FCDA
ads, and celebrities from Orson Welles to Ozzie and Harriet signed
up to help pitch the cause.

Most famously, the FCDA popularized the cartoon figure Bert the
Turtle, star of comic-book pamphlets and short classroom films such
as Duck and Cover. The amiable Bert demonstrated to kids how, in the
event of an attack, "you DUCK to avoid the things flying through the
air ..." (here the panel shows a frightened Bert, with a Richie
Rich-like human sidekick, diving to the ground) "... and COVER to
keep from getting cut or even badly burned." (In the next panel,
Bert withdraws his head into his shell while his friend throws on
the hood of his jacket.) In the movie version, sing-songy music
accompanied the instruction.

Even before the advent of the FCDA, New York, Los Angeles,
Chicago, and other major cities were undertaking biweekly or monthly
atomic air raid drills. Teachers, at a random moment, would order
their students to "Drop!" and the children would crouch and bury
their faces. New York City also spent $159,000 on 2.5 million
identification bracelets, or dog tags, for students to wear at all
times--with the unspoken purpose being that they would help
distinguish children who were lost or killed in a nuclear explosion.
Other cities followed.

Then there was the bomb shelter craze-or crazes, since the
epidemic of "bombshelteritis" that the New York Times reported in
1951 subsided after roughly eight months but returned during moments
of heightened peril. Off and on until the early '60s, Americans
built underground rooms that promised to protect them from a nuclear
attack. Playing on traditional imagery of women as domestic
caretakers, the FCDA pitched housewives advertisements for
"Grandma's Pantry," a home shelter that women should stock with
canned goods, first-aid kits, and flashlights. Commercial firms
marketed a range of safehouses, that ranged from a "$13.50 foxhole
shelter" to a $5,000 "deluxe" model that included a phone, beds,
toilets, and even a Geiger counter. Life magazine even ran a story
on a young newlywed couple who spent their honeymoon in a steel-and-
concrete room 12 feet underground. "Fallout can be fun," the article
said.

It's hard today to do anything but laugh at these Cold War
inanities, but at the time Americans mostly reacted with enthusiasm
or, rarely, with cautionary efforts to ratchet down the hysteria. A
handful of educators, for example, questioned the schools' approach
to nuclear preparedness, suggesting that fear-struck grade-schoolers
gazing out classroom windows for Soviet jets hardly constituted an
ideal learning environment. Some proposed channeling efforts into
the academic study of the USSR and other Communist countries, to
little avail.

Into the early '60s, U.S. News & World Report and Life were still
running cover stories with headlines such as "If Bombs Do Fall-What
Happens to Your Investments," and "How You Can Survive Fallout." But
after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the Cold War's
nadir, and the historic 1963 nuclear test-ban treaty between the
United States and Russia, superpower relations finally began to
thaw. The warming progressed, albeit fitfully, until the Soviet
Union's breakup.

Kennedy's mastery of brinksmanship and his subsequent embrace of
detente contributed to a thaw at home as well. The dire measures and
everyday anxieties of the Truman and Eisenhower years quickly
subsided in 1963. In 1959, 64 percent of Americans surveyed by
Gallup listed nuclear war as the most dire problem facing the
country; by 1965 the number dropped to 16 percent.

It wasn't just Kennedy's shift to a less hawkish foreign policy
that finally retired the civil-defense nuttiness. Anti-nuclear
groups, notably the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy
(known as SANE), raised public awareness of the dangers of nuclear
testing, fallout, and the arms race. Less salubriously, the Vietnam
War diverted attention from the distant theoretical possibility of a
nuclear face-off between the superpowers to the all-too-concrete
reality of old-fashioned on-the-ground warfare in a proxy battlefield.

Perhaps most important, subversive cultural currents helped undermine
the Cold War consensus and exposed the absurdities of its civil-defense
rituals. From Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to the so-called "sick humor" of
Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, critiques of Cold War orthodoxy found their
most effective expression in satire.

Above all, Stanley Kubrick's 1964 classic Dr. Strangelove laid
bare the absurdity of the whole culture of nuclear gamesmanship--the
coterie of influential intellectuals based at RAND and university
labs; the use of game theory; the chillingly rational designs for
nuclear "eventualities"--that had come to dominate government policy
planning. With Kubrick, America learned to stop worrying and love
the bomb. The film not only pointed up the absurdities of the
nation's nuclear policy but also showed that laughter constituted a
saner reaction than panic. If being able to laugh at oneself is a
sign of mental health, then Americans gained a healthy ironic distance
from the excesses of the '50s. More effective than the earnest
admonitions of disarmament celebrities Bertrand Russell and Benjamin
Spock, Strangelove and its cultural kin showed Americans a response
to nuclear danger that went beyond credulous fear.

In less than a generation, Duck and Cover and other civil-defense
relics fell into the category of harmless, amusing nostalgia, like
today's retro '50s diners. The historian JoAnne Brown has recounted
how during the height of Cold War hysteria, one Newton, Mass.,
kindergarten teacher put her pupils to work adorning the school's
bomb shelter with their artwork and turning it into a "reading
den" so they wouldn't be afraid to go there if and when the bombs
came. By the time I was a Newton schoolchild in the '70s, we looked
quizzically on the school's yellow-and-black shelter signs, so
unconnected to anything we learned in class that no teacher or
parent ever bothered to explain what they meant.

Whether it betokens healthy perspective or dangerous "psychic
numbing" (as Robert Jay Lifton has called it), our adjustment to the
half-century old specter of nuclear Armageddon has to be considered
when preparing Americans for a potential terrorist attack. In our
post-Strangelove era, strident insistences that Americans must trust
the government's invocations of national security cut no ice.

It's possible, even likely, that al-Qaida will attempt another
assault. Properly bracing the public for such an attack means tending
to unsexy, difficult policy details such as shoring up port security
and devising a long-term nuclear nonproliferation strategy. Stoking
hysteria with pulsing orange lights and talk of panic rooms will, in
today's jaded, ironical age, invite only mockery.